Revealing: NYT Exposes Clinton
Foundation for Shady Financial and Business Deals
The New York Times is back online,citing their temporary shutdown as “technical
difficulties” as result of an “internal issue.”
Poor timing, as the left-leaning
news source published a devastating reportearlier this morning,
detailing the shady deals and conflicts of interest surrounding the Clinton
Foundation; an organization that has been ‘off limits’ to conservative critics,
who feared criticism would be received poorly due to the noble, charitable
efforts of the foundation.
The report, which came back
on-line early Wednesday afternoon, reveals that the Clintons have used the
charitable foundation to promote other goals, including Bill Clinton’s business
ventures and Hillary Clinton’s political aspirations; this has led to some
unsettling consequences.
According to The Times, the foundation is in
disarray:
“For all of its successes, the
Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating
board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by
conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years,
despite vast amounts of money flowing in.”
The Times highlighted Douglas J. Band, “a onetime
personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate
consulting firm -- which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser -- while
overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative” as a prime example of an employee
with conflicted interests. Band’s private firm, Teneo, charged its clients fees
as high as $250,000 per month—clients that were also Clinton Foundation donors.
“Some Clinton aides and foundation
employees began to wonder where the foundation ended and Teneo began.”
It also highlighted the rocky
financial standing of the foundation, both during and after then-Senator
Clinton’s bid for the presidency in 2008. It appears regular foundation donors
were snagged by the Clinton campaign for donations, plunging the foundation
into a multi-million dollar deficit.
“The foundation’s expansion has
also been accompanied by financial problems. In 2007 and 2008, the foundation
also found itself competing against Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign for
donors…The foundation piled up a $40 million deficit during those two years,
according to tax returns. Last year, it ran more than $8 million in the red.”
The report also solidified the
Clinton’s reputation to cater to celebrity donors--usually by spending
unjustifiable amounts of money on them--or to take large donations from
corporate sponsors in return for prime time publicity—something the Foundation
strictly prohibits. Examples from the report include:
“In 2009, during a Clinton Global
Initiative gathering at the University of Texas at Austin, the foundation
purchased a first-class ticket for the actress Natalie Portman, a special
guest, who brought her beloved Yorkie, according to two former foundation employees.”
In March 2012, David Crane, the
chief executive of NRG, an energy company, led a widely publicized trip with
Mr. Clinton to Haiti, where they toured green energy and solar power projects
that NRG finances through a $1 million commitment to the Clinton Global
Initiative.”
The report will not come as a
shock to all— the Better Business Bureau reviewed the Clinton Foundation in
2012 and found that it failed
to meet the standards of an accountable charity on six counts, mostly due to lack of financial
disclosure.
At the very least, The Times has highlighted, “just how difficult
it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr. Clinton’s
moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton’s political future.”
But let’s go one step further.
Hillary Clinton’s actions, even within
the foundation, suggest that she is gearing up for another presidential
run; this fall, she is moving her foundation staff into brand new offices in
Midtown Manhattan, just down the street from the major news headquarters.
Furthermore, Clinton’s “deputy chief of protocol at the State Department and a
finance director of her presidential campaign, will oversee the endowment
drive, which some of the Clintons’ donors already describe as a dry run for
2016.” (It is also expected that
Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, will be uprooting from
Washington D.C. to join Clinton's staff.)
Nothing the Clintons do is without
strings; there is always some cover-up or shady deal linked to even their most
charitable efforts. If the first Clinton Presidency, and now the Clinton
Foundation, are any kind of indicator as to what a ‘Hillary Clinton Presidency’
would look like, you can be sure it will include scandals and pay offs, with
very little accountability.
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